Thursday, 26 November 2009

Thanksgiving

Did you ever look over a module you use to see who wrote it? There are people behind every line of code you use, people who once had the same problem you had and fixed it for you before you even saw it coming.

I believe today is Thanksgiving Holiday in the US. We don't celebrate anything like it in Brazil - heck, if it weren't for television most people here wouldn't even know about it - but I thought this would be a good time to say "Thank You" to the Perl community and CPAN authors, for making this such a nice language to work with :-)

I pay my bills coding with Perl, loving every minute of it, and I'm sure it wouldn't be half as fun if it weren't for the nice people behind the communities and all the awesome modules I get to use and rely on. Sometimes - and I know I'm not the only one - I spend hours and hours just browsing through CPAN like a developer's Wikipedia. Peeking over at recently uploaded modules is aways fun too!

So, today I pay my respects to some (not all, as I'd be here all week, if not longer - and I need material for next year :-P) of the CPAN authors of modules I use(d) over the years, and thank them. I'll also rate their modules and send them a private email to show my appreciation, just in case they don't ever read this.

Thank you Graham Barr, for Scalar::Util, List::Util, and all the Net::* modules;

Thank you Cory Watson, for Chart::Clicker. I found out about it a couple years ago in Perlmonks and was blown away. Keep it up!;

Thank you Chris Marshall, not only for PDL but also for co-maintaining the awesome Perl OpenGL project together with Bob "grafman" Free (Thanks to you too, Bob!);

Thank you Adriano Ferreira, for Carp::Always, and for being the Brazilian author with most modules in CPAN. You're an inspiration to us all (mesmo entocado aí nas Minas Gerais... vê se aparece!!! :P)

Dammit, I tried keeping this short, but here I was immerse in CPAN awesomeness again. So, if you ever put code out there, be it a whole module, a minor contribution to someone else's, or even a simple bug report, THANK YOU. Be sure you made at least one person's life easier.

Oh, I'll also take my time today to use the perlthanks tool and say thanks to all the nice people who help with perl itself. None of this would be here if not for you guys... Thanks!

2 comments:

Happy thanksgiving, everybody! I would like to thank the following CPAN authors, in no particular order, for writing modules which I use a lot: Adriano Ferreira for Carp::Always, Adam Kennedy for YAML and Module::Install, Audrey Tang for YAML::Syck, Ingy döt Net & Yuval Kogman for YAML::XS, Dave Rolsky for DateTime, Andy Lester for WWW::Mechanize. There are others too of course, and there are also contributors to each module, so thank you all!

Also thanks to Larry Wall for bringing Perl into this world. Thanks to the P5P team for the arduous task that is maintaining the Perl 5 interpreter. Thanks to Audrey for Pugs. Thanks to Patrick Michaud, Jonathan Worthington, and the whole Perl 6 / Parrot / Rakudo gang for keeping the dream alive.